Political Quotes

“I thank the gentlelady from Ohio. You referenced the number of people in the Department of Justice that are tasked with doing the investigations. It was very interesting this week when we had the hearing on Lehman Brothers and Mary Schapiro spoke to their ability to do their job when they only had 24 staff members in that specific division to do investigations of all of the Wall Street firms. If you ill-equip your very agencies to do the job, they won't be able to do the job. Between 2003 and 2007 under the Bush administration with Christopher Cox as the head of the SEC, you will not be surprised to know that there was an 80 percent reduction in enforcement actions at the SEC and 60 percent reduction in disgorgement actions at the SEC. So no surprise that we had an SEC that was ill-equipped, and also a different perspective. It was not there to protect the American people but to allow business to flourish. And the business that flourished was much like what Goldman Sachs was doing where they actually put AIG in some of these synthetic collateralized debt obligations that they knew were going to fail. Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs shorted Lehman Brothers and helped make sure it did come down. It was reportedly in many of the e-mails at Goldman Sachs by employees when they were communicating with some of their clients that they said that they were no longer going to support or back up Bear Stearns, and then all of a sudden Bear Stearns went down.…”